Intel’s first skylake chips coming in August

Fancy a Mac or Windows 10 PC with Intel’s new processors codenamed Skylake? That will soon be possible: Intel is set to launch its first chips based on the new architecture in the first week of August.

The first Skylake chips will be high-end gaming processors that can be overclocked, and will be launched during the Gamescom conference in Cologne, Germany, which runs from 5 to 9 August, according to a source familiar with the company’s plan.

Intel will also shed more technical details about Skylake at its Intel Developer Forum (IDF), due to be held between 18 and 20 August in San Francisco. The chipmaker will talk about how Skylake will improve the experience of using Microsoft’s Windows 10.

The first Skylake chips will be branded ‘Sixth Generation Core’ processors and offer “great performance and reduced power consumption,” Intel said on an IDF technical session page. The company’s goal with Skylake is to make PC usage more convenient. With that in mind, Intel has talked about ‘wire-free’ technologies in Skylake, so PCs could charge and transfer data to peripherals wirelessly.

Dell, HP and Asus will ship Windows 10 PCs based on Skylake in the second half of this year. It’s not clear when the new chip will reach Apple Macs. Some Skylake features are already known. Asus recently showed off ail -in-ones and mini-desktops based on Skylake, with support for the new DDR4 memory and USB 3.1 data transfer protocol. PCs based on Skylake will also have ports based on Thunderbolt 3, a new technology that runs on USB Type-C cables and can transfer data at 40Gb/s.

One interesting technical session at IDF will detail overclocking the Skylake gaming desktop chips. In other sessions, Intel will demonstrate Skylake PCs running Cortana and Windows Hello, a new Windows 10 biometric feature in which faces, fingerprints or eyes can replace passwords. Skylake also has new virtualization, boot, system management and lockdown features, which will be detailed in technical sessions.

Intel has hurried to get Skylake to PCs, so it can close the curtains on the troubled predecessor Broadwell chips, which were delayed due to manufacturing issues on the 14-nanometer process.

Skylake will take on AMD’s chips codenamed Carrizo – which are now reaching PCs. AMD is rushing to release its next-gen chips based on a CPU core codenamed Zen, which will be in PCs next year.